the Wikimedia Commons community wishes that the Wikimedia administrators would do whatever is necessary to enable a method for editors to record metadata in a machine-readable format, such as mw:Extension:RDF. An even more powerful option would be mw:Extension:Semantic MediaWiki, if it can be made to work on a large site like commons or wikipedia.

Metadata here refers to information such as author(s), rights information (license/s), descriptions, date, location and keywords (tags/categories). The code that defines this metadata in a machine readable way would be integrated into templates, especially intop license tags and {{tl:Information}}, so normal users wouldn't have to deal with it. This also means that it would become available for millions of images immediately.

Support But keep in mind that developer's time is limited resource and voting itself is not enough to increase priority of issue (code review, deployment, etc) to them. --EugeneZelenko (talk) 15:44, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

a serious review of the existing extension would be a good start. And having community support is a precondition for an extension to be considered at all, right? -- Duesentrieb⇌ 15:47, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

We use semantic mediaWiki for temporal media tagging within the metavidWiki extension. It does work well... I can imagine a bit of work to scale it up to commons with much less effort than starting from scratch ;)

Note that there is already an img_metadata field in the database, which seems to get its information directly from the file. That metadata is currently only readable through the API (not through the UI) and not changeable at all IIRC. An example of what this metadata looks like is here (note: format will change at the next scap). --Catrope (talk) 13:34, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

I think that just contains the EXIF stuff, i.e. mostly technical metadata, not the authorship/license stuff we want. Well, technically, EXIF *could* provide that info, but few peopl,e actually embed it that way.

For base functionality, it wouldn't even be neccessary to store the datawe want in the DB. although that would sure be useful.

It currently just contains the EXIF stuff, but that could be extended. Just pointing out an existing way of storing and getting metadata so someone else doesn't reinvent the wheel. --Catrope (talk) 15:40, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

As a side note, the above-referenced RDF extension is in widespread use on Wikitravel and has been used to implement article status markers, geographical hierarchies, and various other metadata layering on top of MW. --EvanProdromou (talk) 14:27, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

AS a side note to the side note: Evan wrote the extension, bug him if you have questions :) Well, he's a busy guy, but I hope he'll check back here every now and then. -- Duesentrieb⇌ 15:16, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

Microformats are a good addition to, but no replacement for, proper metadata. Loading full HTML is massive overhead, parsing malformed HTML is slow and unreliable, there are not many good standards for microformats, stuff embeded this way can't easily be stored in the db for optimized queries, etc etc.

If we have proper metadata embedding, mapping them to microformats for html output would sure be nice, yes. But making up microformats as we go along and hope people will find out how to parse our tag soup is not a good idea. -- Duesentrieb⇌ 09:47, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

It would be terrific if MediaWiki could automatically edit the embedded image metadata (e.g. XMP) to match the information on the image page. I think most professional or semi-pro photographers do this already, but most people don't. --bdesham★ 23:58, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

I don't know about "automatically"... I think it should require people to press a button, at least. It could also be an option at upload time. editing the embedded metadata should, however, create a new version of the file, so the original remains available. -- Duesentrieb⇌ 17:32, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

It would be cool if the upload page could detect the metadata in the file before uploading. --ƒajro@♨★ 18:32, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

While I appreciate this request, it is not really solving the problems of re-users. In our opinion, license management/handling needs to be a core feature of MediaWiki, because the software is explicitly developed for the collaborative creation and distribution of free content. Licenses of the contained articles and images should not be represented via some agreed-upon convention (if at all in smaller wikis) but via structured (and machine-readable) information, available for each relevant object in the wiki. This is not limited to images but also necessary for articles since wikis like Wikisource include text covered by various licenses.

Some information that would be desired:

Full (official) name of the license(s)

Whether the full text of the license has to be included or a reference is sufficient

Reference to the full text of the license(s) (in some rigidly defined format like wikitext)

Whether attribution is required

Data required to attribute

So, basically all the information that's required to check if it's possible to take some part of the MediaWiki and use it somewhere else and all the information that has to be included in derived works. This information should be available in every default MediaWiki setup, being accessible via API and be part of the XHTML also.

I know that these requirements are somewhat out of the scope of this request. But since it was motivated by the WMFs Mission is to "disseminate [educational content] effectively and globally" I wanted to add my view on what would be necessary to achieve this. --He!ko (talk) 12:19, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

Hi He!ko,

This request is precisely about getting license data into a machine readable format. Perhaps it can be incorporated into the MW API even though it is via an extension. I don't think it is too far from your request. --pfctdayelise(说什么?) 03:08, 12 March 2009 (UTC)